


my mouth is full of stars

by honey_wheeler



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, First Time, Half-Sibling Incest, M/M, Sexual Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-21
Updated: 2011-11-21
Packaged: 2017-10-26 09:01:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/281200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jon’s always belonged to Robb, in any way Robb would have him, since they were barely more than babes and he was called Robb’s Shadow more than he was called his own name. He’s been Robb’s and Robb has almost been his and that’s just the way things have always been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my mouth is full of stars

**Author's Note:**

> Canon compliant, **MAJOR spoilers through _A Storm of Swords_ in the epilogue** (you can stop at the double-starred rows if you don’t want to be spoiled). I pretty much hold with the theory that Jon isn’t Ned’s son, so if that makes you more comfortable with this fic, by all means.

Jon would love to say it’s sudden.

He could blame it on his youth, on the changes brought with growing not all so long ago into manhood, his body all stretched and sprouted in ungainly ways now, his mind a constant roil of want and illicit imaginings. That’s all it is, the unruly blush of a boy’s spring acting on him in unpredictable ways – that’s what he might say if he were in any position to be asked, if anyone cared about such things when it came to the bastard son of Winterfell. But in truth, his unruly body has merely made it worse, made hidden thoughts manifest in flesh in embarrassing ways. He’s always belonged to Robb, in any way Robb would have him, since they were barely more than babes and he was called Robb’s Shadow more than he was called his own name. He’s been Robb’s and Robb has almost been his and that’s just the way things have always been. That’s nothing new. Only the wanting has changed, deepening like a river after a hard rain, overflowing its banks and threatening everything around it, the shame that accompanies it enough to make every day a never ending misery.

Robb seems to have no such issues. He's left youth behind so gracefully as to be absurd, slipped on the mantle of manhood like a second skin, easy and instinctive. He has no shameful longings the way Jon does. He doesn’t lie awake at night and imagine his brother - his _brother_ , gods help him – doesn’t imagine kissing him and touching him and lying with him. Not the way Jon does. Robb mustn’t. If he did, he wouldn’t spend his days easy and golden the way he does, no cares, nothing to occupy him but the rightness of his own life.

It’s unfair, Jon knows, to be angry with Robb for such a thing. But then, deep down Jon knows that he’s angry for other reasons, that his anger is what holds Robb away, makes their always-easy relationship suddenly grow troubled and stilted. That without his anger, he is far too weak to be near Robb without betraying everything.

Robb had been patient for a long time, much longer than Jon deserved. He’d met Jon’s coldness with gentle confusion, his hostility with hurt. He’d tried to talk to Jon, to ask what was going on, but each time the words Jon wanted to say piled up on his tongue, crowded his throat, and he couldn’t answer, couldn’t give Robb anything but more distance. And now Robb’s become more angry than patient, more snappish than hurt. He’s even taken to spending more time than ever with Theon, which is almost worse than anything. It’s one more unhappiness, one more parcel of guilt. Jon’s wanted so badly to fix things, to make everything right. To make _himself_ right. But he can’t. He has no idea how.

Of all the shame Jon’s known in his life – and there’s been much, no mistake – this might be the worst.

*****

“Where are you going?” Jon turns his head automatically at Arya’s words and immediately wishes he hadn’t when he sees Robb standing with Theon, both dressed to leave the castle. Any hope he had of looking away before Robb caught his eye is extinguished before it’s begun; Robb’s eyes had already been on him. He tries to slide his eyes past, as if he was just looking by and Robb happened to be there. Gods, this is pathetic. Jon feels _pathetic_.

“Into the village,” Theon says. Then he inclines his head at Jon with a nasty gleam in his eye and says, “And you’re not invited, _Snow_.” It’s not as if the battle for Robb’s attention is new between Jon and Theon, but this is the first time Jon feels like it might be at Robb’s behest. And the first time Jon feels like he might lose. His porridge turns to stone in his belly. It’s an effort to take up another spoonful, to swallow it as if Theon’s words don’t bother him in the slightest.

“Wouldn’t want to be,” Jon answers, refusing to look up. He won’t look at Robb. He can’t. Theon clearly has no idea what to make of Jon’s lack of response. He shuffles his boots on the floor. Jon can see Sansa glancing between them uncertainly, Arya glaring at Theon.

“Come on, Theon,” is all Robb says, something strange and heavy in his voice, and Jon won’t look up, he _won’t_.

“You’re acting like children,” Sansa sniffs disapprovingly when they’ve gone, and Jon rounds on her so fiercely that she actually recoils.

“Says the child,” he snaps. It strikes true – Sansa fancies herself ever so grown and mature, even sometimes speaking to Robb as if she’s his elder – and her chin trembles. Before Jon can even think to apologize, she’s pushing away from the table, so quickly she almost upsets the bench, and hurrying from the room. Jon sighs and pushes a frustrated hand through his hair, tightening it into a fist until the roots pull at his scalp enough to hurt. She’d said nothing that wasn’t true. Now he’s a bastard in behavior as well as name. Bloody lovely.

“What’s gotten into you?” Arya demands. “You’re acting like a wolf with a bee up its nose.”

“Nothing.”

“If you’re fighting with Robb, you should just stop it and make up.”

“Stay out of it, Arya,” Jon growls, but Arya refuses to be put off.

“You’re being _weird_ ,” she insists. “I don’t like it. It feels wrong. You and Robb shouldn’t fight, you love each other too much.” Then she adds in a low grumble, “not like me and Sansa,” and Jon smiles, despite the ache in his heart.

“Maybe someday you’ll become friends,” he suggests, only for her to make a face at him before he’s even finished the sentence. Jon laughs, reaching across the table to ruffle her hair in the way she claims to hate.

“I mean it,” she tells him, swatting away his hand and fixing him with a stern glare that would be comical on such a young girl if he didn’t know from experience that she was tough enough to back it up with her fists and feet. “Stop fighting with him. Or you’ll answer to me.”

“Yes, milady,” he says, the one thing she pretends to mislike more than him ruffling her hair. It’s reassuring, her predictability. At least he knows this one thing, he and Arya, will always be the same, no matter how everything around them changes.

“Good,” she nods, satisfied. “I like it so much better when he spends time with you rather than Theon. You’re much nicer to be around.” The expression on her face says just what she thinks of Theon’s company and Jon smiles, heartened. It’s petty to find validation in the approvals and mislikes of a child, but Jon takes such things where he can these days.

*****

It takes Jon all through the next morning's meal and quintain practice and sparring to pluck up the nerve to talk to Robb, Arya’s orders fresh on his mind. Part of the trouble is that he has no idea what to say. Jon’s never been especially gifted with words, never much of a conversationalist. Hard enough to talk to people in ideal situations, let alone when you’ve been horrible to them for weeks on end. Of course, he’d never had trouble talking to Robb before, never once in his life; Robb is probably the only person Jon could even say that about. Everything between them has always been as easy as breathing, and just as unthinking. It only makes it all the harder, makes Jon feel like even more of a heel. So does the look of surprise on Robb’s face when Jon offers him a greeting as they stow their practice swords in the armory.

“Warm today,” Jon says tentatively, toying with the blunted edge of his sword where it hangs on the wall.

“What?” Robb asks, blinking as if stunned by walking from a dark room into sunlight. Jon flushes, embarrassed.

“I just said it was warm today,” he mutters. He almost feels like it would have been better to leave it as it was rather than struggle through such awkwardness. It’s all the more awful compared to how sure and easy they’d always been with each other before.

“I suppose it is,” Robb says cautiously, hanging his own sword beside Jon’s, the metal swinging and striking against the other sword with a dull sound. Inanely, Jon nods, then curses himself for his stupidity. This is beyond idiotic. He should have just gotten Hodor to have the conversation for him. It could only have gone better, and Hodor is probably better at being a decent fucking human being than Jon is at this point. Jon scrubs a tired hand over his face. A faint frown creases Robb’s forehead, confusion plain on his face. After they stand silently for several long, excruciating moments, Robb sighs and turns to leave the armory, only to pull up short at the door.

“Do you,” he says, stalling and clearing his throat. “We could swim. In the godswood, at the little pool.” He clears his throat again, looks off to the side as if something of great interest lurks just beyond the door. “I mean, if you want to. To cool off a little.” The thought makes Jon’s mouth dry up, knowing the torment that comes with being so close to Robb, knowing the misery that comes with wanting to look and to touch but knowing he mustn’t. But still. He’d probably best get used to it. Jon knows such torment won’t be ending any time soon, so he’ll just have to find ways to manage.

“Sure,” he says, giving Robb a small smile. The effect on Robb is immediate, gutting, the tentative hope on his face like to break Jon’s heart. Knowing that Robb hates this distance between them just as much as Jon does only makes everything worse. It only makes Jon want him all the more, brings back every bit of what he’s tried so hard to ignore. Gods, Jon _misses_ him, more than he thought possible, he wants so desperately to be how they were, but he _doesn’t know how_. When Robb moves to touch a hand to Jon’s shoulder, his smile almost shy, it sends Jon into a panic. He wants Robb to touch him more than he’s ever wanted anything, and he knows he daren’t let him.

“Don’t,” Jon says, and Robb freezes, hand hanging in the air between them. To his own ears, Jon sounds scared, desperate, pathetic. Robb only seems to hear the refusal, though, and his face flushes, his jaw clenches until it looks like it must hurt, the rejection surely all the more painful after his hopes had been raised. His hand balls into a fist and he drops it to his side.

“Fine,” Robb bites off. “Fine, we’ll do it your way.” Jon’s never seen him so angry. Not directed at Jon, at least. Robb stalks from the yard, his steps jerky and loud on the flagstones. Jon wants to stop him, wants desperately to call him back, but he doesn’t know how. He doesn’t know anything at all anymore.

*****

It’s been three days and they haven’t spoken a word to each other. It’s been harder than anything Jon’s ever done before and frighteningly easy at the same time. He never would have dreamed they could avoid each other so completely, not even in a place as big as Winterfell. It should be a relief but instead it’s just one more misery to pile on top of the others. Jon feels he could collapse under so much weight.

“You said you were going to stop fighting with him,” Arya reminds him. “You promised me you would!”

“Arya, I tried.”

“Well, what happened?”

He wants to be able to tell her. It’s killing him, having all this inside him with no way to let it out, but she’s just a child and she’s his sister and she wouldn’t understand. No one would understand. So he just shrugs, looks off somewhere over her head.

“Ugh, boys are so _stupid_ ,” she fumes. She leaves him alone, only his thoughts to keep him company. Trouble is, nothing could be poorer company at the moment. He needs something physical to do, something that will drive his thoughts from his head until he can handle them. If he can ever handle them.

Robb’s there at the pool in the godswood when Jon arrives, reaching for the clasp of his cloak as if he’d only just gotten there himself. It’s as if Jon has some extra sense where Robb is concerned, like he could find him anywhere at any time – in a crowded hall, in a deserted wood, in a raging snowstorm – even if he’d rather avoid him. Robb says nothing when he sees Jon. He only looks at him with wary eyes. Silence grows between them, a wall built brick by horrible brick, and Jon’s about to say something, _anything_ , when Robb rolls his eyes and makes an impatient sound.

“I’ll go,” Robb says.

“No, I will,” Jon counters. Even in this, he can’t give Robb the satisfaction. Gods, what is _wrong_ with him?

“Jon,” Robb says, his tone laced with warning.

“Robb,” Jon mimics right back.

“Use the fucking pool, _Snow_.” There’s a hard, uncharacteristically ugly edge to Robb’s voice when he says it. Jon recognizes it for what it is. An order from his better, from the trueborn son to his bastard brother. A haze of red swims behind Jon’s eyelids and he’s got his shoulder against Robb’s stomach before he even realizes he’s moving, the ground rushing up to meet them as Robb gives a startled shout.

He’d surprised Robb, that’s the only reason Jon was able to get the drop on him. They’re about the same size, but Robb is surprisingly strong, wiry and powerful like a hound. It’s only determination and stubbornness that ever allow Jon to hold his own when they spar in the yard, his refusal to back down even as he seeks to match Robb rather than overpower him. He doesn’t even know if he _could_ win if he tried. He only knows he’s never wanted to try. Not with Robb. But now it’s like his body is inhabited by someone he doesn’t know, some other boy who fights to win. They’ve never fought like this, not with such barely leashed anger and tension, each blow landing with intent. That’s the most painful part of it, far worse than the push of Robb’s limbs or the force of his grip.

They struggle and thrash, leaves crunching under their bodies, breath gusting out loud and clouded in the chill air. Jon’s barely gotten the advantage when Robb gives a massive heave, catching Jon off guard with the strength of it. They both go rolling, ending up in a tangle of limbs, Jon’s grip lost. They’re grappling face to face now, Robb’s hands clamped around Jon’s wrists, their legs locked together like shears. Jon’s pulse is pounding, his blood thundering in his ears. He can hear the ragged sound of their breathing, can see the individual drops of sweat collecting in the hollow of Robb’s throat. Unbidden, the thought springs to his mind that he’d like to lick that sweat away, that he’s _dying_ to. His abdomen tightens like a fist and he freezes.

Robb’s not one to pass up an advantage. Before Jon knows it, he’s on his back, arms pinned above his head, the weight of Robb’s body holding him immobile. Jon’s trying to think of something, _anything_ to keep from getting hard – rats, the flux, latrines, Old Nan naked – but Robb’s shifting around, stretching Jon’s arms higher and pushing Jon’s knees apart with his thigh. He’s grinning with grim satisfaction, anger just under the curve of his lips, and his breath is coming in pants, and there’s nothing Jon can do.

Jon can tell the instant Robb notices. His grin fades and he rears back a bit to stare at Jon. The movement makes his hips press into Jon’s further and Jon can’t bite back a moan. It hangs in the air between them, loud and urgent and _horrible_ , and Robb’s mouth drops open, his expression surprised, confused. They stay locked in place for who knows how long, each staring at the other. Tense silence stretches between them. The longer it stretches, the harder Jon gets until he can barely see straight, his pulse a sharp throb in his veins, his need leavened with fear. Somewhere deep in his heart, Jon wonders if this is what he wanted to happen when he tackled Robb, if he wanted to force this confrontation, see Robb’s disgust. Even deeper in his heart, he thinks he might have held fast to the hope that it wouldn’t be disgust. But now that the moment is at hand, it’s too much and he’s suddenly desperately afraid of what he’s started, what he can’t take back.

With a speed that surprises Jon, Robb is suddenly on his feet. He stands there still staring at Jon, his right hand rubbing along his thigh, his chest jerking. Now that their bodies aren’t in contact, the air seems even colder and Jon starts to shiver. He stays on the ground. He’s not sure he can stand up, but even if he could, he’s still not convinced Robb won’t strike him once they’re face to face again.

Then Robb’s gone. Jon hears his footsteps crunching through the leaves until they’re swallowed up by the sound of the wind and the wood. He lies there on the ground long after Robb’s gone, waiting to get up until his body stops shivering so badly. When he finally feels like he can stand, he pushes himself gingerly to his feet. There’s no sound but the wind through the trees. Everything else is still; even the surface of the little pool is smooth and glassy. He wants to disrupt it, to make it as broken as he feels. The rock he pitches in falls with a plunk, sends circles expanding across the surface of the water, but it’s not enough. Going about in sodden clothes will be stupid but Jon’s beyond caring when he jumps in still dressed, only his cloak and boots left on the bank. The water is cold, near to freezing, but it’s still warmer than Jon feels inside.

*****

There’s a nagging feeling of dread in the back of Jon’s head when he wakes the next morrow, as if he remembers something terrible happening but isn’t sure that he didn’t dream it. The ceiling doesn’t offer any reassurance as he stares at it while every moment of the day before bangs about in his head, particularly the moments with Robb looking at him in shock and confusion. And probably disgust. Jon might as well put a name to it. He lingers overlong in bed, until he knows everyone must have broken their fasts, gone about their days. The last thing he wants to do is sit across a table from Robb and make polite talk. So it’s with no small amount of annoyance that he finally comes down to the hall to learn Robb is gone, has been gone since before dawn. All that dread for nothing. It sets anger simmering under his skin and he itches for someplace to direct it, knowing it’s irrational but beyond caring.

Robb and Lord Stark come back to find him in the yard, practice sword in his hand, hacking away at a dummy. It’s all anger and no skill, he knows. Ser Rodrik would be aghast if he could see. Jon tries to remember his training, but it’s dissolved now, gone in the face of his fury. Fuck Robb and his disgust. Just fuck him.

“Steady, Jon,” their father calls, but Jon pays him no heed, redoubles his blows. He can hear Lord Stark go inside, knows that Robb hasn’t followed. He can’t see Robb there behind him, but he knows he’s there. He always knows he’s there. Suddenly hacking at the dummy like a butcher no longer gives him any satisfaction. With one last blow at it, Jon leaves off and stalks towards the armory, leaving Robb to stay or follow as he will. He follows. Jon would have to unpack his feelings about that fact like a valise.

“So where were you all day?” he finally permits himself to ask after he’s stowed his sword and shrugged off the padded doublet he put on out of habit. He sounds like a sullen boy. Gods, he’d thought he’d hit his limit of self-loathing, but apparently he had greater heights to reach.

“Father wanted me to come with him to hear grievances,” Robb says with a shrug, sounding almost like he’s embarrassed. “It… He thinks I need to start learning the rule of Winterfell.”

“Ah, the young lord apprentice,” Jon says, his tone so bitter he can’t bear himself, but he can’t seem to stop. Robb bristles, his crossed arms falling into fists at his sides.

“You know I never asked for any of this,” he says, angry and clipped. If Jon were smart, he’d heed the warning and stop, but he’s never been all so smart when it comes to Robb, for better or worse.

“No, you never have to ask for anything, do you, your lordship?”

“Don’t you start with me, Jon,” Robb fairly growls.

“Or what?” Jon challenges him, the dread and fear that simmered all day making him reckless. He needs Robb’s anger, needs it to shore up his own, to keep the need and anguish from bleeding out through the cracks. “Or you’ll do what?”

Faster than Jon can blink, Robb is across the room. He’s got Jon up against the wall with an arm at his throat and Jon’s ready, waiting for it, desperate for it. So desperate he feels like his knees might buckle or he might pass out or maybe punch Robb in the face just to have something physical to do. He wants to give Robb a black eye. He wants to climb inside him or tear him apart with his teeth. But Robb doesn’t hit him, doesn’t wrestle him to the ground. He just stares at Jon, stares at him for an eternity, and then his eyes drop to Jon’s lips and the air in Jon’s lungs evaporates, burned up by the fire suddenly raging in his belly.

“I dreamed of you,” Robb rasps. “Your hands and your cock and your lips. All of you. I wanted you so badly I woke up in agony and you won’t leave my head. Get the fuck out of my head, Jon.” A sick-sweet ache gathers in Jon’s belly, sends heat licking out just beneath his skin. And then Robb’s kissing him, hard and fierce and good, so good, gods, Jon has never felt anything so good in all his life.

“Get out of my head,” Robb says again, but the words are soft now, desperate. He slides his tongue along the seam of Jon’s lips and Jon’s almost too stunned to respond, to do anything but stand there like he’s made of stone. “Jon,” Robb says against his lips, “Jon, come on,” the words rough and needy, and Jon gasps against them, then against the soft sweep of Robb’s tongue into his now-open mouth. Something hot and wild and unbearably intense bubbles up inside Jon’s chest, spilling out through his mouth, his nose, his ears, and finally – finally, it seems like, though it’s only been moments – he kisses Robb back and the world is someplace entirely new. When Robb pulls away, Jon feels his absence as keenly as pain.

“This,” Robb starts. “We can’t…” Jon’s stomach twists, he braces himself for the doubt, the regrets, the recriminations. Instead, Robb loops his fingers around Jon’s wrist and pulls him from the armory, across the yard and into the tower, up the stairs towards their chambers. Jon hurries to keep up, trying not to stumble on the steps as Robb pulls him along. Robb’s fingers aren’t all so tight, but they might as well be an iron manacle for all Jon could break free. It occurs to him that the hope singing along his nerves might be unfounded. What if Robb only wishes to yell at him in private? What if he plans to bar Jon in his room so he can tell their father? What if, what if, _what if_.

Any ifs are destroyed, though, when Robb gets to Jon’s chambers and propels him inside, taking only the time to latch the door before pulling his shirt over his head in one swift movement and moving to do the same to Jon’s. The shirt has barely cleared Jon’s head before Robb’s reaching for him, pulling them together, the bare skin of Robb’s chest hot against Jon’s own. Robb groans at the contact, the sound of it so choked and needy that Jon can half imagine it’s Robb that’s been wanting this, desperate for it, Robb who’s been blinded by need rather than Jon. Then Robb’s kissing him again, hungry and messy and sweet, and Jon stops thinking entirely.

The frame of the bed groans when they collapse on it, sounding out a protest Jon can barely hear over the rough saw of their breathing, the wet sound of their mouths, the rush of blood in his ears. Robb’s teeth collide with Jon’s lip and a metallic tang spreads in Jon’s mouth.

“Ow,” he says in surprise. He pulls away and touches his lip, two fingers coming away bloody. Robb catches his hand to inspect his fingers. He looks back up at Jon, wary. Jon wonders if Robb thinks maybe they should stop, that maybe this will jar him to his senses. He looks back at Robb’s lips, unconsciously darting his tongue out to taste the blood on his own, and any worry he had that Robb might want to stop evaporates when Robb groans, closes his lips around Jon’s fingers to lick off the blood and then kisses Jon again, his tongue smoothing the split before sweeping back into his mouth, the taste of Jon’s own blood like iron on Robb’s tongue.

Jon’s only just gotten used to this – only just worked through the fact that Robb is kissing him and touching him, that his _tongue_ is still in Jon’s _mouth_ , for gods’ sakes – when Robb wrenches away to pant into Jon’s hair.

“Jon,” he rasps against Jon’s temple. “We don’t have to. We can stop if you-”

“I don’t want to stop,” Jon interrupts him, surprised. He would have thought Robb was the one who would want to stop. “Don’t stop,” he repeats, and Robb makes that choked sound again, leans in and licks his way into Jon’s mouth and Jon’s swimming with it, kissing him back, wanting nothing more than to climb inside him and feel him from the inside out. He floats, mindless, the taste of Robb’s mouth and the feel of his hands the only things in existence, until Robb catches Jon’s wrist and pulls his hand down to press it full against Robb’s crotch. The whimpering sound he makes when Jon instinctively rubs with the heel of his palm is urgent, encouraging.

“Is this,” Robb stops and licks his lips. “Is it okay?” Were he not struggling for control, Jon might laugh at the futility of such a question once Robb’s already put Jon’s hand on his cock. As it is, he can’t keep himself from shaking as he pulls at Robb’s laces with clumsy hands, steals inside to pull Robb from his breeches. The first touch of his hand makes Robb hiss, arch up into his touch.

Jon’s used to a different perspective and it takes him a fumbling moment to get his wrist going the right direction. When he finally does, Robb’s body shudders like he’s just been struck a blow. He wraps his arm around Jon’s shoulders, pulls him in close. It makes it a little harder for Jon to move his hand, but Robb won’t loosen his grip. He keeps Jon pressed up against him, his mouth at Jon’s ear so Jon can hear his ragged breathing, can hear him grunt and groan and say, “Fuck, oh fuck, Jon, _fuck_.” Jon’s never heard anything so filthy. It sets his body on a knife-edge of want.

“Hurry,” Robb urges him.

“I’m trying!” Jon twists his hand, moves more quickly. His own cock is so hard he’s having trouble breathing. As if he’s reading Jon’s mind, Robb moves his hand down, angling it between their bodies, and slides it over Jon through his breeches. Jon practically shoots off the bed at the contact, but he manages to keep his own hand moving. Soon they’ve got a staggered rhythm going, Jon’s fist on the downstroke, the flat of Robb’s hand on the up. Jon’s embarrassed to realize that he’s probably going to go first. He pauses, spits into the palm of his hand, and resumes at a quicker pace, just managing to hold on until he feels Robb there with him before he spends in his breeches like he’s a green boy with no control.

Robb’s body stiffens, his spine curving away from Jon like a longbow. He fumbles on the bed beside them for one of the shirts he’d thrown there earlier, holds it over Jon’s hand still on him as he spills in hot pulses, making a wordless sound in Jon’s ear. Jon can’t really see anything, but he feels warmth spread on the back of his hand, feels it stick to the shirt under Robb’s grip. Jon isn’t sure what to do with his other hand. He flutters it from Robb’s thigh to his waist, to his back. Robb doesn’t seem to suffer from the same problem. His hand is still firmly planted on Jon’s crotch.

“We seem to have made a mess,” Jon offers awkwardly, after several long moments of silence, after they finally ease apart. Robb looks down and plucks the wet fabric away from his body.

Robb shrugs. “Good thing it’s your shirt.” The laugh that escapes Jon is genuine and involuntary, more of a bark than anything. He fetches Robb a punch in the shoulder.

“You bast-” he starts, but Robb’s lips swallow the word, his kiss far too tender for Jon to bear. A day’s growth of beard bristles under Jon’s fingers when he touches a trembling hand to Robb’s cheek, angling his head to get at his mouth better, needing to feel Robb’s tongue, his teeth and his breath.

“Doesn’t seem fair,” Robb says at length, after they’ve kissed long enough for Jon’s tongue to feel sore, for his jaw to ache and his cock to throb like he didn’t just find release not long before.

“What doesn’t?” Jon asks hazily, wanting only more of Robb’s mouth. In answer, Robb palms the still-damp patch at the front of Jon’s breeches, fingers the laces at the edge of the placket. He pulls back and meets Jon’s eyes, his own gone dark and glittery in the light of the fire.

“It’s only fair,” he says, and Jon couldn’t draw breath if he tried, not when Robb’s freeing him from his breeches, circling him with callused fingers. “Fuck,” Robb breathes into his neck, damp and hot, “gods, Jon.” It’s the best thing Jon’s ever felt, better than it feels when he does it to himself a hundred times over, even though the angle is awkward and Robb can’t quite get a rhythm going at first.

“You’d think I’d be better at this with all the practicing I’ve done on myself,” Robb notes on a frustrated laugh. Jon would laugh too except for how all he can do is imagine Robb touching himself, how he must sound and look. He wonders if Robb ever thought of Jon when he did, the way Jon thinks of him. The idea spears through him, makes his whole body tighten, and he grits out Robb’s name when he spills, no shirt this time to keep him from making a mess of his belly and Robb’s hand. He expects Robb to make a joke of it, to pull away and clean himself off. Instead he plants his hand on Jon’s stomach, their skin sticking together, and he kisses Jon, bears him back on the bed until they’re stretched alongside each other, and still he doesn’t move his hand.

“It’s too early to sleep,” Jon hears himself saying as if from a distance, everything sounding cloudy and softened. Robb looks out the window at the still-light sky, as if he hadn’t noticed it was day before, and gives Jon a rakish grin that impossibly has his pulse speeding and his stomach tightening again.

“So we won’t sleep.”

*****

Robb is gone when Jon awakes the next morrow. The furs on the other side of his bed are smooth, no evidence that Robb had lain there, spent the night beside Jon. Only the smell of him lingering on the furs, the spots rubbed red and tender on Jon’s neck from Robb’s beard, only the vivid memory of his skin under Jon’s fingers remain to give witness to his presence there. It feels almost like a dream. Could it have only been a dream? Jon wonders hazily, snaking his hand under the furs to circle himself, imagining that it’s Robb’s hand again and not his own, that he’ll open his eyes and see Robb’s face there, fierce and urgent and somehow beautiful.

The face he sees across the table in the Great Hall shows no trace of urgency, though. Robb is cheery, relaxed, utterly normal. He doesn’t look the way Jon feels, as if he wants nothing more than to suck on Jon’s tongue and dive insistent fingers under his shirt the way Jon can’t stop imagining doing to him. It’s almost like it was before. Oh gods, there’s a before. There is Jon and Robb before they... _before_ , and Jon and Robb after. It’s with a sinking feeling that Jon thinks maybe it was just fleeting for Robb. That he’d gotten it out of his system and now things would go on as normal. Perhaps it’s for the best. By any measure, what they’d done was wrong, but… No, Jon could never believe that. What he feels for Robb couldn’t truly be wrong. Robb might not share that certainty, though, and it’s enough to strike ice into Jon’s heart.

“Ready to be annihilated, Snow?” Theon asks, pushing back from the table at Ser Rodrik’s approach. It takes a moment to penetrate the suddenly panicked fog in Jon’s head. He glances over at Robb, expecting… What he expects, he doesn’t really know. A spark of recognition. A twinge of shame. _Something_. But Robb just grins and gives Theon’s shoulder a clout that’s hard enough to rock him forward.

“You and what army, Greyjoy?” Robb asks.

Training is a welcome distraction, Theon a good target for venting Jon’s increasing agitation and misery. He’d thought he was done with this. He’d thought the hard part was over. It had never occurred to him to wonder what would happen beyond those first kisses, the first touch. Now he sees that if he’d thought being without Robb was agony before, it’s nothing compared to what it would be now.

He doesn’t want to fight Robb when Ser Rodrik calls for them to change out. He’s too afraid of what he might do. Robb seems to have no such problem, parrying Jon’s unusually sloppy blows with ease, laughing at the fierceness on Jon’s face.

“You’ve a thirst for blood today,” he calls. He gets a hand on Jon’s wrist, wrenches him close, inside the reach of Jon’s sword. Jon can feel the heat of him even through the padded doublet he wears, he can smell the mix of sweat and leather and Robb himself. He curses the traitorous leap of his heart when Robb puts his lips at Jon’s ear to speak, steels himself against Robb’s nearness. But then Robb’s tongue darts along the sensitive spot behind Jon’s jaw and he’s whispering to Jon, saying, “The pool, in the godswood.”

“W-what?” Jon manages, confused, afraid, desperate with need and hope.

“After,” Robb says, teeth on the lobe of Jon’s ear, then he pushes away, aims a swing that Jon only blocks through habit and instinct, and they’re sparring again, Jon left to wonder if he’d imagined the whole thing.

Robb’s waiting for him when Jon arrives, under the blood-red leaves and the pale white branches of the weirwood. He’s waiting there for Jon, as Jon’s been waiting for Robb for maybe his entire life. It’s not like last night. Last night had been sudden, unexpected. Unthinking. This is deliberate. This is a choice, and they’re both making it, gods punish or preserve them. Robb reaches to curl his fingers in Jon’s shirt and Jon steps forward to meet him, buzzing with need and nerves and giddy relief. He lets out an unsteady moan the second Robb’s tongue is against his – he can’t help it. He suddenly never wants to kiss anyone other than Robb for the rest of his life. Even if Robb stopped right now and never touched him again, Jon would rather go without than allow anyone else this intimacy.

Luckily, Robb doesn’t stop. The way he kisses him, Jon could believe he never will.

*****

They meet in the godswood every day, usually more than once in a day, sometimes more than twice. They don’t even have to say the words now. A look from Robb, Jon’s careful hand on Robb’s back, the barest change in breathing and they both know, slipping off to find each other under the leaves and limbs and the blazing blue sky.

Jon spends all his days waiting for those signs, desperate for them. He’s all nerves, every bit of his body attuned to Robb, to his every word and noise and movement. It comes with an unfortunate new habit of clumsiness; Jon’s lost count of the number of things he’s dropped, the times he’s knocked over a cup of wine or candle. One particularly harrowing incident involved knocking over a cup of wine _and_ a candle. The burns on the sleeve of her new dress are just one more thing Sansa will probably never forgive him for.

He lives for the time he spends with Robb in the godswood, or the nights they spend in either of their rooms, sneaking back to their own rooms just before the dawn or sometimes staying, sleeping in one bed like they used to as boys, passing it off as nothing more than brothers sharing space. Robb somehow knows all about the sensitive spot behind Jon’s right ear, how he likes to have his hair tugged, his lower lip bitten. All the things that Jon’s never told anyone and the things that Jon never even had reason to know himself – Robb instinctively knows all of them already.

Jon tries to remember if he’d told Robb, if they’d talked about this sort of thing before, but no, of course they didn’t, they couldn’t have. They _don’t_ talk about this sort of thing, they never have, and now Jon’s wondering if maybe this – this hot, desperate thing between them that finds them twisting and panting against each other at every chance – maybe this is why they didn’t.

It should feel wrong, doing what they’re doing in the godswood, in such a sanctified place. It should but it doesn’t. Jon can think of nothing more sacred than the feel of Robb’s heartbeat beneath his own, nothing more true and right than the touch of Robb’s hands and lips.

*****

“Teeth,” Robb hisses. They’ve gotten more adventurous, more daring. Less inclined to resist the things they’ve wanted all along but were afraid they shouldn’t do. Jon is on his knees, his cupped hands pressed over Robb’s sharp hipbones, holding him to the wall of his bedchamber. He has no idea what he’s doing, never done a thing like this before in his life. It’s nothing but instinct and nerve guiding him, and the vague idea of what he would want to feel if he were Robb. Except for the teeth. Those were an accident.

“Sorry!” Jon says. He rocks back on his heels, wanting to look at Robb’s cock – it’s right there in front of him – but feeling nervous and strange about it, like it’s somehow impolite. Robb gives an unsteady laugh, flexes his hand in Jon’s hair.

“Can you really be so unseasoned, Snow?”

“Because I do things like this all the bloody time,” Jon says, voice dripping acid. He swipes the back of his hand across his mouth, massages the slight ache in the hinge of his jaw. He has no idea how he’s supposed to have a conversation in such a situation. If whores are indeed able to make this seem easy, he thinks, they’re worth their wages and more.

“And I do?” Robb retorts.

“I’m hardly privy to what you get up to when you’re jaunting about with Greyjoy,” Jon shoots back, determined not to back down, not when he’s already on his knees and embarrassed and somehow still painfully hard in his breeches despite all that.

“Shall tell you you’re the first?” Robb laughs, lazy and insolent and amused, cupping Jon’s cheek and tracing a rough thumb over his lower lip, sending shivers all the way down to Jon’s toes. “Shall I tell you that you’re the only one? That no one’s ever made me feel this way?”

Yes. “No.” _Gods_. “Shut up, you fucking prick.” Jon drops his hands to wrap around Robb’s legs, his fingers settling on the naked crooks at the back of Robb’s knees. The skin there is hot, damp; the pulse of blood just below the surface pounds like a drum. Jon tries again, curling his lips over his teeth this time, and is rewarded by Robb’s guttural moan. It sings through Jon’s veins, makes him feel powerful. Strange how such a vulnerable position could make him feel stronger than he ever has.

Jon wouldn’t have thought he’d enjoy such a thing, but he can’t deny that he does. The taste of Robb is different but not unpleasant. And there’s a certain heady thrill in learning him, in finding the places where he’s most sensitive. In making his breathing hitch and the muscles in his belly flutter. There’s a ridged spot on the underside of his cock that makes Robb come to pieces when Jon laves it with his tongue, so he does it again, and again, reveling in the helpless sounds Robb makes deep in his chest.

“Jon,” Robb says in the sweetest whine when he’s clearly getting close, stroking at Jon’s face with careless hands, pushing his fingers into Jon’s hair to tighten and pull. Jon speeds his pace, sucks at Robb with more insistent pressure. It’s only after the pulses of Robb’s release have hit the back of his throat that he thinks maybe this isn’t something that’s done, that he should have pulled away. His throat works as he swallows and it only makes Robb groan and shake all the harder.

“That could have gone a bit better,” Jon mumbles into Robb’s chest when they’ve collapsed onto the floor together, Robb’s arm loose and boneless about Jon’s waist.

“On the contrary,” Robb chuckles. “I thought it most effective.”

“You’re not the one who’ll need someone to chew his food for him tonight at supper,” Jon points out tartly, stretching his sore jaw as if for proof. Dutifully, Robb slides a soothing hand from ear to chin, presses his thumb and middle finger at the hinges firmly enough to make Jon’s jaw ache pleasantly. He angles Jon’s face to his and regards him softly, thoughtfully.

“If you would master a… _sword_ , you must practice diligently,” he says, then gives his eyebrows a comical waggle. Jon doesn’t miss the quirk of his mouth, the wicked gleam in his eye.

“Did the heir of Winterfell just make a vulgar joke?” Jon asks in disbelief. Robb gives his head a shake, a rueful sigh on his lips.

“Terrible, isn’t it?” he says.

“Scandalous.”

“Perhaps,” Robb suggests, “you’d best occupy my mouth before I bring further shame on our house.”

“Probably,” Jon says with a thoughtful nod. “For the good of Winterfell.”

“For the good of Winterfell,” Robb agrees.

“I suppose if I must.” Jon issues a long-suffering sigh against Robb’s lips, into his already open mouth, any soreness in his jaw forgotten completely.

“Oh, you must,” Robb tells him, before neither says anything at all for quite a while.

*****

“I have to wonder where you learned to do such things,” Robb says idly, fingers tangling in Jon’s hair, lazy and soft. He relaxes quickly after, Jon’s learned, sometimes almost falling asleep after Jon’s taken him in his mouth, brought him to release. Jon turns his face into Robb’s chest, bites gently at the lean flesh over his ribs. Robb shivers under his mouth, though whether from the touch or the wind blowing through the trees, Jon isn’t sure.

“Nowhere,” he mumbles. “Just do ‘em.”

“A natural talent,” Robb laughs. “Aren’t I the luckiest boy in the north.”

“Well, what about you?” Jon demands, setting his chin against Robb’s shoulder so he can see Robb’s face. “Have you done anything with anyone?”

“You mean besides myself?” Robb asks with a smirk.

“Shut up, I’m being serious.”

“Once,” Robb admits. He falls silent then, fingers still moving through Jon’s hair, his other hand barely stroking along the inside of Jon’s wrist where it lies over Robb’s stomach, like he’s not even aware he’s doing it.

“Once?” Jon prompts. He’s not sure he’ll like the answer, but he still wants to know. He’d always rather know.

“Theon took me with him to the village,” he says. “To a brothel.” Jon bites back his opinion of Theon and his company, encouraging Robb to continue with his silence. “There was a girl. A…well, a whore, obviously.” Robb colors at the word. Absurdly, it makes Jon want to kiss his neck, to taste the shell of his ear, but he forces himself to stay still. “We kissed and I. You know.”

“Not entirely,” Jon says drily.

“Touched her. Down…there. With. You _know_.” Robb waggles his fingers with a rueful air, as if he can’t believe he’s saying such things, let alone has done them. “And then I properly embarrassed myself in my breeches before we really got anywhere.”

“That was it?” Jon asks, trying to keep a laugh out of his voice.

“Yeah. She said we could go again and she wouldn’t charge me, but.” He shrugs up his shoulders, the movement jostling Jon’s head so that the tip of his nose brushes the soft spot behind Robb’s ear. It makes Robb’s voice trail off into a wordless sound of pleasure, so Jon does it again, then touches the spot with the flat of his tongue.

“But?”

“I didn’t want to.” Robb’s voice is rough, now, unsteady. His hand has tightened around Jon’s wrist over his stomach and Jon deliberately pushes his hips up against Robb’s side, lets Robb feel him hot and hard against him.

“When was this?” Jon asks. He looks at Robb’s face, the carved profile of it; his lips are pink and wet from his own tongue, open to let him breathe in soft pants. He’s got red patches on his neck from Jon’s beard, even as new and soft as it still is, and Jon licks each one, soothes them with his tongue.

“What?” Robb asks, sounding hazy, distracted.

“When did it happen?”

“The day we got that raven from Lord Manderly, about the tournament at White Harbor,” Robb answers impatiently. “Jon, stop asking questions and do something better with your mouth.”

Jon smiles and obeys, rolling fully atop Robb to taste his lips, lick inside. He can’t help moving his hips, dragging them over Robb’s in a stuttering slide, the still undone laces of Robb’s breeches rolling and tangling between them. Robb seems to like it as well as Jon does, judging by the sound he’s making in the back of his throat. Jon rocks against him once more, then twice, then enough times to lose count, aware of nothing but the tension fisting in his belly and spreading out to his limbs. So he’s taken by surprise when Robb heaves up against him, rolls them over until Robb is on top, his thighs on either side of Jon’s pinning him there.

“I believe it’s your turn,” he says, and at first Jon has no idea what he means, but then Rob reaches for his laces and tugs his breeches down past his smallclothes – the smallclothes Robb has always laughed at him for wearing, calling him the Maiden every time he sees them – and wiggles down Jon’s body until Jon can feel Robb’s breath on his cock even through the cloth. Jon’s toes curl with the realization of what Robb intends.

“You,” he says on a hissing breath. “Robb, you don’t have to if-”

“Only fair,” Robb says, mouth ticking up into a decidedly less than innocent grin. Heat sears through Jon’s smallclothes as Robb mouthes at him, outlines the shape of Jon’s cock with his tongue. It practically sends Jon out of his skin. He never imagined anything could ever feel so good, never imagined it could ever be Robb doing it. But then – gorgeously, amazingly – it feels even better as Robb tugs down the fabric separating them and gets his mouth on Jon’s skin. Robb must have been paying attention the times Jon was doing this to him, because he goes straight for the things that Jon quickly figured out Robb liked best, using his fingers and tongue well enough that a tremor sets in to Jon’s thighs before he’s even really adjusted to the idea that Robb’s mouth is on him, that his _tongue_ is, oh fuck, oh _gods_.

Jon’s heels dig into the rough ground, his body arches up into Robb so strongly he thinks he might actually hurt himself. Shaking, almost wanting to cry, he spends into Robb’s mouth, and, gods, Robb holds him there, swallows, his throat closing around Jon’s cock and making him shake even harder. The retreat of Robb’s lips and tongue milk one last, long shiver out of him, one that’s shamefully unaffected by the sound of Robb’s coughing, the way he clears his throat. Jon should feel guilty, but he can’t. The last thing he feels right now is guilt. He only realizes he really did cry – or at least the clench of his eyes had forced water down his cheeks – when Robb pulls up to lie next to him and traces the line of moisture with his finger.

“Don’t turn all Sansa Sadface on me,” he chuckles. Jon looks at him, at his playful grin, his lips swollen and used-looking.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Jon gasps out, not yet able to catch his breath. “The…” He loops one finger at his throat, ignores the color rushing to his cheeks and forces out, “swallowing.” Robb grins.

“You did it,” he points out. “And I can hardly let you outpace me in something, can I? Besides, we Starks believe in fairness.”

“Never knew there were such benefits,” Jon laughs weakly. “Thought it was all judgments and beheadings.”

“I guess there’s a lot you don’t know, Snow.”

“I suppose there is.”

It’s not until much later, after he’s left Robb in the godswood to sneak back to the keep, after he’s cleaned up and changed and supped with everyone even though Robb begged off and Jon had wanted nothing more than to do the same, that he remembers what Robb had said, about the brothel and the raven from White Harbor. He remembers that day. Robb had been gone for the morning, that much of it was accurate. He’d come back, though, come back straight to Jon, found him in his room and dragged him out to the yard for a seemingly endless round of sparring, then to the pool in the godswood where they swam and laughed and laid out in the sun. Jon remembers Robb’s strong young body stretched out in a patch of bright beside him, how Jon had blushed and looked away, staring up at the sky and looking for shapes in the clouds that would make him think of anything but his brother. How he couldn’t stop himself from wanting, from growing hard, so he’d rolled over on to his stomach and pillowed his head on his forearms, closing his eyes and listening to Robb’s voice. How Robb had talked and talked and talked, needing no answers from Jon, content with only his company. It had somehow been one of the best days Jon ever had. And Robb had chosen to spend it with him, instead of with a ready and willing girl.

Robb’s already asleep when Jon slips into his room, exhausted from the long nights they’ve been spending together. His voice is soft and muzzy when he murmurs a greeting, reaches for Jon with sleep-clumsy fingers. Jon tries not to let his emotions overwhelm him, he tries not to be so bloody stupid about it. But he’s kissing Robb like he’ll die if he doesn’t, like Robb’s the only thing keeping him from flying up off the ground and into the sky.

“What’s gotten into you?” Robb asks with a sleepy laugh when Jon pulls away to suck in a shaky breath. “Not that I’m complaining.” Jon can’t answer. All he can do is kiss Robb harder, push against him like he means to slip inside his skin, as if he could get so close that they’d never be separate again. He knows such a thing isn’t possible. But that’s never yet stopped him from wanting.

*****

“Handsome little lad, isn’t he?” Robb hoists the wriggling direwolf cub up to look at him. “Like master, like beast. Which makes that sorry runt of yours all the more fitting.” He grins at Jon, no sting in his words.

Jon looks down at the ball of fur nestled in his lap, pale and small and warm. The beast had ridden tucked into his jerkin all the way back to the keep, curled against his ribs, and already Jon had felt a little more tied to the world than he’d been just an hour before.

“I think he’s quite striking,” he says. He ducks his head and the cub stretches up to sniff at him. Jon starts to say something else, only to be caught open-mouthed by the wet swipe of a rough tongue. He laughs, rubs his hand over his mouth and chin. “And very forward.”

“Irresistible to man _and_ beast, you are,” Robb laughs, his eyes warm. Admiring. Jon flushes, pleased and embarrassed. He gives the wolf a scratch, rubbing his fingers through the downy fur not yet given over to even a bit of coarseness, stealing glances up at Robb from beneath his fringe.

“What d’you think you’ll name yours?” he asks. Robb gives the squirming cub in his hands a critical look.

“He’s greyer than the others,” he says thoughtfully. “And he’s a fast little bugger. Would Grey Wind be too obvious?”

“Maybe a bit,” Jon allows, smiling. “But it suits him.” And it does. A straightforward name, direct and true. Like Robb himself. Like master, like beast. Robb sets Grey Wind on the floor, then drops down to sit next to Jon where he’s leaning against the bed, warm against Jon’s side as they watch the pup investigate Robb’s chambers.

“What about yours?” he asks with a nudge of his shoulder. He extends careful fingers for the white cub to sniff, then gives him a good scratch behind the ears, his forearm pressing against Jon’s ribs, making Jon feel as squirmy as Grey Wind had been earlier.

“Ghost,” Jon says. He’d known that would be the wolf’s name the second he let himself believe it was meant for him. Robb’s smile is wry, gentle.

“A bit obvious,” he says, echoing Jon’s earlier words, “but it suits him. Present in a world he’s not truly part of.” Then Robb’s smile changes, his eyes fill with the most impossibly fond sadness. “Like beast, like master.” A profound sense of loneliness uncurls in Jon’s ribs. Robb does his best to understand. But just as Jon doesn’t know what it is to truly be a Stark, Robb could never know what it is not to be. Each of them can only look in from the outside.

Carefully, deliberately, Robb lifts Ghost from Jon’s lap, sets him on the floor and gives him a scoot towards his brother. Then Robb slides a hand along Jon’s jaw, curls strong fingers behind Jon’s neck and thumbs the shell of his ear to make Jon shiver. His lips are gentle, coaxing. Dizzying. Jon opens his mouth under Robb’s, leans up into him.

Somehow they manage not to break the kiss when they stand, or when they climb onto the bed, Robb following Jon down, anchoring him to the mattress with the press of his body. The cubs could be getting into all kinds of trouble, but Jon can’t think of them, can’t make room in his head for anything but the feel of Robb against him, the rub of his thigh between Jon’s, slow and sweet and maddening.

As if they’re a single person, they both fumble for their laces, each pulling the other free from the confines of leather cords and cloth. The feel of Robb’s cock rubbing against his own rips every bit of breath from Jon’s lungs. Robb catches Jon’s hand, wraps it around both of their cocks under his, pushes up against him to slide and snag in ways that make Jon see stars. His hips buck up, jerky and helpless into Robb’s cock, his hand, Jon’s own, both – Jon not sure where his body ends and Robb’s begins anymore. Their groans of release interlace, lapping over each other same as their fingers, their bodies, their lives.

Jon stirs and wakes at some point, when the fire’s burned down to embers and everything’s quiet. Ghost, he thinks, and sits up to check on the cubs. It takes a moment to find them, small as they are, curled up tight together in a grey-and-white-striped ball on the hearth. He laughs a bit, no more than an exhalation. Truly, he thinks. Like masters, like beasts.

Robb’s face is soft and open in sleep, his eyelashes fanned on his cheeks, darker than his hair. Gently, softer than snowfall, Jon brushes them with his thumb. They’re dense and curved, like mink to the touch. He pushes the curls off Robb’s forehead with careful fingers. Robb makes a contented sound in his sleep, turns his face into Jon’s touch. Gods, Jon never wants to stop touching him.

Maybe he only allows himself such tenderness because Robb is asleep. He’d not be brave enough otherwise, he couldn’t trace Robb’s ribs, count his scars, map the stretch of bones under pale skin with a feather-light hand. There’s a beauty to him, an undeniable grace in the way he inhabits his body with so little thought or worry. Robb has never doubted who he is. He’s never doubted his right to want. Jon’s eyes prickle and he blinks against it, not wanting that particular wall to crumble just yet. He drops his head, smoothes his cheek against the back of Robb’s hand.

The curl of Robb’s fingers startles him. He jerks his head back from the hand suddenly cupped under his chin, turns his head to see Robb watching him with eyes that Jon knows are seeing too much. Robb’s fingers curl around Jon’s ear with the barest of pressure, but it’s more than enough and Jon allows Robb to pull him up, to kiss him softly, gently, so sweetly Jon really might cry now.

He doesn’t want to sleep, not when he’s tucked up under Robb’s chin, wrapped in him like the warmest blanket. Jon wants to stay awake, to not let a moment of this go unnoticed. But his eyes grow heavy, holding shut longer with each blink, and soon he slips into sleep, Robb’s breath stirring Jon’s hair.

*****

“Where’d that boy lord get off to? He’s not been around to make us bow and scrape to him yet this morrow.”

Jon hears the words with a start, halts his foot just inside the door to the smithy, stilling his hand on the wood frame and listening to the voices outside. They don’t realize he’s there. They mustn’t. A Snow he may be, but Jon is still of Winterfell and the Baratheon men are smart enough to hold their tongues in mixed company.

“Off with the bastard, no doubt,” another says on a laugh. Jon recognizes this one, one of the houndsmen, a great coarse brute bearing a bandage on one calf from the time he tried to give Grey Wind a kick to keep him away from the dogs, and who’s misliked Grey Wind and Robb by proxy ever since. “Those two puppies are always slinking off somewhere, I seen ‘em heading towards the godswood all the time.” Jon flushes, feels unaccountably like he’s been caught out unclothed.

“Nah, he’s gone to the village with the ward,” yet another offers. “Off to visit a brothel, Greyjoy told me. Get Stark’s wick dipped for once.”

“’Bout bloody time,” the houndsman says, “maybe he won’t be such a self-righteous prig no more.” Were his heart not suffering such a swift plunge into his stomach, Jon would take offense on Robb’s behalf. As it is, he has to put out a hand to steady himself against the wall. A brothel. A brothel with Theon. It taps into every unspoken worry Jon has had, every thought that Robb might grow uncomfortable with Jon’s need for him, that he might feel overwhelmed and pull away. Jon feels like he might retch. It’s as if the last months had never existed, as if he’s still that green boy, desperate and longing and alone, wanting what he’s not allowed.

Automatically, unthinkingly, Jon fetches a practice sword as he’d intended before he overheard the men, walks woodenly out into the yard to the straw dummy he’d done his best to destroy so long ago, the last time Robb went into the village with Theon. No, he stops himself, not all so long ago. It only feels long ago. It only seems like he and Robb have been doing this forever, this… _this_. All of it, all they do. All Jon thought Robb wanted him to do, all Jon needs, dreams of, doesn’t know how he’ll live without…

The post bearing the straw and burlap dummy almost splinters with the force of Jon’s first blow. The anger feels comfortable, familiar, and he embraces it, gathers it to him and translates it into the force of his swings. Some small part of his mind says that maybe the men were mistaken, maybe it’s not what it seems. That everything with Robb could still be real. That Jon should wait and see. Were he not almost entirely _out_ of his mind, Jon might hear that voice, might even heed it.

His next swing puts the practice sword through the dummy entirely, burying the blunted edge in the wooden post beneath. Cursing, he tugs at the blade, on the verge of planting a booted foot against the post to lever it free when a chuckle behind him has him spinning, leaving the sword to project uselessly from the dummy’s side.

“That one won’t be troubling you again,” Robb says, a familiar quirk on his lips, one that Jon doesn’t know if he wants to strike or kiss off. Then he imagines those lips touching someone else and he settles on the former.

“Back early from your fun, aren’t you,” he says, low and flat, no question in the words. The quirk disappears, replaced by surprise and then realization.

“Jon, it wasn’t-”

“No, it’s fine. You don’t need to explain, not to the likes of me.” He hates how brittle he sounds, as if he might shatter like ice under fire. He wants to be as hard as Valyrian steel, as hard as the stone Winterfell is built on.

“Jon, come on-”

“Not like you belong to me, right?” Jon says, and he almost believes it. Almost, but not entirely. Surely the look on Robb’s face that says he doesn’t entirely believe it either is just Jon’s imagination. Fanciful thinking. A trick of the light.

“I didn’t even want to go!” Robb protests. “Theon-” Just the name makes rage bubble up in Jon’s chest, makes it seep through his ribs and spread under his skin, sharp and hot.

“Fuck Theon,” he growls over whatever Robb was going to say. “Fuck you.” Robb’s ready for it when Jon rushes him, hands raised to catch Jon’s arms, and they struggle with each other, slipping in and out of each other’s grips like eels. Every time Jon thinks he should back down, he remembers those voices outside the forge, remembers the sick feeling in his gut when he heard where Robb was. Sparks fly on the edges of his vision and suddenly he’s pushing away, raising his fists and driving one into Robb’s eye.

"Ow," Robb gasps as he staggers away, almost more in surprise than in pain. "You punched me." He touches a hand to his cheekbone and stares at Jon, eyes wide and round and shocked. It takes the air out of the fight and they stand apart, reaching for breath, the cold air making Jon's lungs sting. Jon's never done this before, never been the aggressor or come at Robb with fists. If Robb's surprised, it's nothing compared to Jon's own shock. They’re still standing there when Arya comes through the door from the kitchens and gives them an appraising look.

"You're not fighting again, are you?" she demands. Jon looks at Robb mutely, his defiance spent completely, leaving him feeling empty and shaky and entirely unlike himself. Robb doesn’t answer at first, and the silence stretches into something else, some deep current, a river that Jon would have no idea how to ford. Arya looks between them curiously, suspiciously.

"No," Robb finally bites off curtly, and then stomps from the yard with jerky strides, leaving Arya behind him to make a face at his poor manners.

“What was that all about?” she asks.

“I couldn’t begin to tell you,” Jon says, and it somehow manages to evade the truth and land right on it at the same time.

*****

Robb’s door is closed when Jon climbs the steps to his chambers that night after supper, but it’s unlatched and swings open easily at the pressure of Jon’s hand. Some secret piece of him thinks that Robb left it open for him, that he knew Jon would come, but he tamps it down as he latches the door behind him. Robb’s sitting on his bed with his knees drawn up, arms around his shins. His eye is puffy and starting to darken, even in the dim light, and Jon feels a pang of remorse mixed with some more complicated emotion he can’t name. He sits at Robb’s knees, his thigh over Robb’s bare toes. Silently, he touches his fingers to the bruise, ghosts them gently over the skin that’s already turning purple.

"I'm sorry," he says.

“No girl has lips like yours,” Robb says. “I tried to find one.”

“Robb-”

“I didn’t want to go,” he says, echoing his earlier words. He catches Jon’s collar and tugs him forward, their foreheads pressed together, noses almost mashed against each other. “Theon tricked me into it and I didn’t know how to just leave. And I looked and looked for a girl who wouldn’t make me wish I had you instead and there wasn’t one. She doesn’t fucking exist, all right?”

Jon has no idea what to say. There’s nothing _to_ say, so he doesn’t talk at all, just pushes forward to catch Robb’s mouth, to tell him everything there’s no way of saying. Robb shudders against him, tilts his chin up to get at Jon, the moan wrenched from the back of his throat sounding pained and tormented. Jon’s life has never been easy. But it’s never been so horribly complicated before.

He’s born Robb down onto the mattress before he realizes he’s doing it, gotten Robb’s wrists pinned out to either side of him. Robb twists a little at Jon’s grip, the barest confusion ghosting across his face. This isn’t what they do. It’s Jon who yields, Jon who follows Robb’s lead. But something inside Jon has changed, some vital part has slipped loose.

Jon lets go of one wrist, splays his fingers on Robb’s jaw and cheek. Drags his thumb along Robb’s lower lip and pushes it inside Robb’s mouth. Immediately, Robb sucks at it in hot, wet pulls that Jon feels down to his toes, echoing low in his belly. Jon shudders, eyes rolling back in his head. Some instinct has him hooking his arms under Robb’s knees, pushing them up to Robb’s chest along Jon’s sides as far as he can, until Robb groans from the stretch of his muscles. Then Jon rocks his hips, pushing Robb’s knees out to the sides, and Robb’s groan changes tenor entirely, becomes pliant and urgent. Some distant part of Jon’s brain registers that he’s humping against Robb like an animal, that he’d be ashamed of himself if only he were capable of feeling shame anymore. Another part knows with a certainty beyond any he’s felt that there’s no shame in this. He wonders now how he ever believed this could be wrong, how he could have ever doubted that Robb wanted him. Now it seems like those are the only right and true things in his life.

“Tell me what you want,” he orders Robb, rough and low.

“Everything,” Robb gasps, panting and mindless. “All of you. Jon, please, _please_.” It’s only one small word, please, but it’s like being struck by lightning. White heat crackles through Jon’s body. He rocks back to sit on his haunches and pulls Robb up to kneel astride his thighs, strips Robb’s shirt off over his head briskly enough to make his hair a wild halo about his head. He licks and sucks at every bit of Robb he can reach – his mouth, his ears, his neck and collarbones, his chest and nipples and ribs – all while never stopping the motion of his hips, rutting up into Rob, feeling the rub of his cock even through the two layers of their breeches. Robb’s fingers tangle in his hair, grapple at his shoulders, wild and rough. He nips at Jon’s lower lip, teeth blunt and insistent, digs his nails into Jon’s back hard enough to leave marks. Jon shudders, near throwing Robb back to the bed and licking his way down Robb’s body to lave at the line of skin above his breeches before pulling them off and sucking Robb’s cock into his mouth all at once.

“Jon,” Robb cries, choked and needy. He angles his head back into the mattress, arches his back and clenches his fists in the sleeping furs. Jon takes him as deeply as he can, his nose pressing into the dark hair at Robb’s abdomen, dark like his eyelashes. The smell of him is strong, almost overwhelming, and Jon hums in satisfaction unthinkingly, his throat tightening around Robb and making him writhe. Robb is too close, Jon knows, and he’s not ready for this to be done just yet, so he pulls back, licks a wet stripe down Robb’s cock and around the base before pulling back to bite at the soft, pale skin inside his thighs, admiring the red marks that will darken and purple tomorrow.

It’s almost entirely chance that has Jon’s hand sliding down, around to where Robb’s skin is taut and sensitive. The pressure of his knuckles has Robb making an almost inhuman sound, a low ululation. Curious despite the need crashing through him, Jon slows, presses experimentally at the pucker of Robb’s flesh. Now Robb makes no sound at all, his body twisted in silent wanting against the furs, mouth wide open and eyes shut tight. It’s not as if Jon hasn’t heard of such things; Theon is full of all sorts of stories, and his favorites among them are of buggery and filth and vulgar acts – talk of filth being the province of men who are less than skilled at the practice of it, Jon’s father had said once in a rare display of scorn. Jon had just never thought to pay attention – though Theon probably would have proved less than a reliable source on the matter anyway – so this is something new and foreign to him entirely. But for Robb, if Robb wants it… He looks up and meets Robb’s eyes, understanding passing between them.

“Tell me what you want,” he says again, but this time it’s soft and low and almost a whisper.

“Everything,” Robb whispers in return, pushing against Jon’s knuckles and making a thin, helpless sound. He shifts his foot, stroking it deliberately over Jon’s achingly hard cock. “Everything.” Jon has to close his eyes and struggle against the unruly surge of his body, his response to Robb’s need.

“It’ll be rough,” Jon warns, meeting Robb’s eyes again. He may have never done this before, but he can tell that straight away.

“I don’t care,” Robb says.

“Robb-”

“Just do it. I want it. I want you to.” Jon shivers, closes his eyes and lets the words roll over him, lets them burrow under his skin. Wordlessly, he shucks his clothes and settles farther down between Robb’s thighs, puts two fingers at Robb’s lips and pushes them inside the wet warmth of his mouth for Robb to suck, knowing instinctively that the dampness will help.

Robb’s face softens, turns slack at the pressure of Jon’s finger against him; his eyes glitter black and then close entirely when Jon pushes inside and works him open to get another finger in. Robb’s twisting down on Jon’s fingers, making small, mewling sounds at the back of his throat that are driving Jon mad, almost destroying every bit of control he’s holding on to so desperately. Quickly, he spits in the palm of his other hand, slides it over his cock and then slowly – so terribly slowly – pushes in to replace his fingers. Jon has to hold completely still for a long moment, too full of feeling and sensation, so much that he thinks it might split his skin from the inside. Robb is stretched and shivering, spine arched tighter than a bowstring, mouth open in a soundless gape. Jon’s terrified of hurting him, of doing this wrong, but Robb is pushing back against him, pulling at him, stroking at any part of Jon he can reach with trembling hands, and Jon can’t help but buck forward, the thrust of his hips pushing Robb back on the bed and wringing a choked sound from his throat.

“Robb,” Jon rasps, low and harsh. “Robb, did I hurt you? I’m-”

“Didn’t hurt me,” Robb grits out. “Not any way I didn’t want. Stop asking and _don’t stop_.”

Robb’s nails cut dull crescents in the skin of Jon’s forearms. Jon doesn’t realize one is bleeding until Robb lifts his hand, licks the blood his fingers off the way he did that first night they were together. Helplessly, Jon surges forward again, less careful than he should be and Robb makes a sound like he could be dying. The questions are on Jon’s tongue – are you okay, did I hurt you, should I stop – but Jon forces himself not to ask, just gentles and slows the best he can.

Dimly, Jon’s glad of the stone walls, the thick oaken door between them and the rest of the keep. There would be no mistaking the sounds they’re making, the groans and inarticulate cries, the damp slap of their bodies coming together. Each sound drills into Jon, burrowing deep down inside him. He’s making Robb feel like that, _he’s_ the reason for each whimper, each wordless slide of vowels that’s wrung from Robb’s open mouth. He thinks maybe it would be enough; if it all ended tonight, this might almost be enough to last him a lifetime. But then Robb’s stroking a shaking hand down Jon’s belly to tease at the coarse hair where they’re joined, he’s fumbling for Jon’s own hand to wrap it around his cock and guide it over and down, and Jon knows it will never, ever, _ever_ be enough, not near enough.

After all they’ve done together, Jon can read Robb’s face like a book now, can translate every twitch and grimace. When he knows Robb is nearly there, he leans forward, seeking Robb’s lips. Robb meets him halfway, hungry and welcoming. Jon wants to watch, wants to see Robb’s release, but he needs Robb’s mouth too much. Next time, he thinks to himself, then shivers at the thought that there could be a next time, that this is his and Robb’s whenever they want it. Robb spends hot and sticky between them, the slick slide of their bellies wringing him out even more. Jon loses his care, pushing into Robb faster, harder, needing and wanting and bloody mindless. When he spills inside Robb it’s like leaving his body, turning inside out like a fur-lined glove peeled from a hand, soft insides exposed to the world.

“So that wasn’t terrible,” Robb says later, after a heartbeat, an hour, a day; Jon can’t begin to comprehend anything as ordinary as the passage of time anymore, not in this new world he’s been born into. He would laugh if his body didn’t feel as wrung out as a washrag.

“I,” Jon starts, hesitant. “You’re sure I didn’t hurt you?”

“Ask me that one more time and I’ll hurt _you_ ,” Robb replies, but there’s a softness to his voice. Jon knows full well just how much Robb put himself in Jon’s hands. The awareness catches in his throat, makes swallowing difficult. Robb’s trust is humbling. Jon may not deserve it, but the idea that Robb thinks he does is enough.

“Next time I won’t ask, then.” He peeks up at Robb, raises a brow, sly and challenging. Robb breaks out in a delighted laugh, tracing a thumb over Jon’s lower lip.

“You sound awfully sure there’ll be a next time,” Robb says. Jon shrugs and grins, feeling like his face might break.

“Always hope for the best,” he says.

*****

“You’re acting strange again.” Jon fixes Arya with his sternest look, one that Bran and Rickon and even Sansa would be cowed by, but that Arya blithely ignores. “Well, you are,” she says. “First you fought with Robb all the time, now you’re acting like you barely know him. I see you talk to the Imp more than you talk to Robb.” Jon can feel his cheeks burning. Somehow he thought he was being clever by barely talking to Robb, acting as if nothing’s been going on – as if he didn’t have Robb beneath him just earlier, in the quiet hours before dawn, his heels leaving bruises on either side of Jon’s spine – but all he accomplished was the opposite.

“No idea what you’re talking about,” he tells Arya in the firmest I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it voice he can manage, and for once she heeds him, albeit with a disgruntled sigh. Then her face changes, turning sad and wistful.

“Is Robb going to marry cousin Myrcella?”

“What?” Jon asks, taken aback. “Where did you hear such a thing?”

“Some of the men in the yard were talking about it,” she says, glum and sullen, stabbing a spoon into her porridge with unnecessary force. “They said Robb might as well get one young enough that he could train her not to talk, and they laughed. And then they said some other things but I didn’t really understand them and I don’t think I’m allowed to repeat them.”

“I think they were joking,” Jon says gently. “At least about Myrcella.”

“But he will have to marry, won’t he,” she says, more statement than question.

“I suppose,” Jon answers, trying not to let such a thought strike ice into his heart. “He’ll be the Lord of Winterfell someday. He’ll need an heir. You didn’t think he’d marry you, did you?” Jon teases, forcing a light tone and tousling Arya’s hair to distract himself from the sudden heaviness in his chest.

“No,” Arya scowls. “I’m not stupid.” Jon wishes he could say the same. It’s entirely ridiculous, really, for him to even feel a shred of surprise over this. He knew Robb would someday marry. He’s always known. But there’s knowing and there’s _knowing_. If Jon’s honest, he would admit to himself that he… He shakes his head, wanting to laugh at himself for his foolishness. What did he think, that he would be Robb’s consort? That they would rule Winterfell together? It would be funny if it didn’t feel so horrible. Unbidden, his eyes shift to the end of the table where Lady Stark sits, breaking her own fast. As if she feels his eyes on her, she looks up, catches him in a gaze sharper than a hawk’s. He knows she’s never liked what she sees in him. When he was younger, he’d believed it was his own fault, that he’d done something to merit her hatred. Coming to the realization that he’d done nothing to earn it besides existing never made it any easier.

She narrows her eyes at him now, looks at him with cold hostility. She will never let me stay, he thinks. No matter what Robb or Lord Stark or anyone else says. And with Lord Stark going south and the others going with him… Jon tries to imagine some girl living here with Robb – wearing his cloak, taking his name, bearing his children. Knowing his touch. Holding his heart.

The porridge roils in Jon’s stomach, threatens to climb back up in his throat. He swallows with difficulty, pushing the bowl away and excusing himself from the table. Lady Stark watches him go with hard eyes; he can feel them on his back until he’s shut the door behind him.

*****

They have the hot springs to themselves. It’s a more and more difficult feat to manage of late, the keep swarming with people as it is. But now there’s no one but them in the hot waters, no king’s men, no queen’s, only Jon and Robb and their wolves. The surface of the pool steams in the cold air, shrouding them in a foggy mist. Jon can barely see the opposite side of the pool. It lends everything an air of unreality; were it not for the comparative coolness of Robb’s chest at his back, Robb’s arm banded across his chest from shoulder to armpit, his thighs alongside Jon’s own, Jon might think he’s dreaming.

“Nice to be here alone for once,” Robb says. Jon wouldn’t disagree. He trails his palms over Robb’s legs, the hair feeling almost smooth under the water. “It’s gotten right crowded around here.” Jon smiles at the disgruntled tone to Robb’s voice. Finding ways to be with each other has definitely been more complicated since the King and his company arrived. Their rooms are at least always their own, but they spend little time there during the day – someone is always knocking on the door, rousting them out, telling them to go outside and get some sun before they turn see-through – and their ability to make it through an entire day without wanting each other to the point of madness is shockingly low, even after all the time they’ve spent together.

“Alone,” Robb continues. “No one to bother us…” He tightens his arm about Jon’s chest, trails his other hand down Rob’s side. Dips a fingertip into Jon’s navel to make him quiver, before continuing over the hair arrowing down Jon’s abdomen to take him in hand. “No one to interrupt us…”

“Someone might come,” Jon says, even as he’s sinking deeper into Robb’s arms, straining towards the touch of his hand, none of which is lost on Robb, who smiles against Jon’s neck before biting a delicate line from tendon to collarbone.

“Grey Wind will warn us.”

“You always have such good ideas,” Jon exhales on a shuddering breath. Robb pulls at him with a steady grip, slow and easy, twisting his hand at the top each time. Jon relaxes fully into his arms, pushing back into the cradle of Robb’s hips with deliberate movements and smiling at the satisfied thrum Robb gives. Jon snakes a hand behind him and palms at Robb’s cock, already hard against the small of Jon’s back.

There’s a certain thrill in doing this someplace so frequented, where anyone could stumble upon them. It’s reckless, probably, but that only makes it all the more real. Real and painful and wonderful.

Jon finishes first – he’d gotten a head start, after all, and he can’t get his hand at a good angle behind his back – the water swirling around him, erasing the evidence of his release. Robb moves his hand to himself, then, knuckles bumping against Jon’s spine in a way that leaves him oddly breathless. Jon listens to the tight whimpers vibrating through Robb’s chest and into Jon’s, whimpers that grow more choked and desperate the closer Robb gets. Soon he spills against Jon’s back, the water sweeping that clean away as well. Jon has to laugh and wonder that they’d never tried this before. It’s certainly convenient. When he’s done, Robb loops both arms about Jon’s neck, his legs coming up to cross in front of Jon’s hips. Jon has to close his eyes against how much it makes him feel, against every impossible thing that it makes him want.

“Arya thinks you’re going to marry Myrcella,” he mentions. Robb’s immediate splutter is highly satisfying.

“What?! Myrcella is…her age isn’t even two numbers yet!” Jon smiles. He tilts his head back to Robb’s shoulder. In response, Robb rubs his face against Jon’s, an affectionate slide that reminds Jon of Grey Wind butting his head up against Ghost’s.

“Arya heard some men joking about it in the courtyard, took it a bit seriously.”

“Not bloody likely,” Robb mutters.

“Even if they told you to?” Jon asks, voice so low he almost can’t hear himself, even though the words he didn’t say are practically loud enough to scream. Robb goes still and quiet. Jon knows he’s breached a wall they’d tacitly maintained up till now, a boundary between what they do and what it means. But even if he could take the words back, he’s not sure he would. “Would you have a choice?” Jon presses when Robb still can’t answer.

“I don’t know,” Robb says, but it’s a lie. Jon knows that as well as he knows anything.

A sharp, short bark from Grey Wind warns them of someone’s approach. Jon hates to pull away from Robb. The fact that he’s not allowed this – that he has to hide the best part of his life – it’s enough to kill him if he thinks on it. The look on Robb’s face when Jon moves to the other side of the pool is dangerous; it allows Jon to think that maybe Robb feels the same.

“Hello lads,” Jory calls cheerily from the mists behind Robb, Theon tramping behind him, shooting a mistrustful look over his shoulder at Ghost. The two of them have never gotten on. Probably because Theon’s a prick and Ghost is a good judge of character. Not that Jon would ever say such a thing aloud, particularly not when Robb has such a blind spot where Theon is concerned.

Jon’s never been good at chatter. It’s well enough at the moment. He’ll not be expected to talk with Jory, to exchange vague politeness with Theon. Robb talks for the both of them, leaving Jon free to think on all he and Robb had said, to return to it over and over, gnawing at it like Ghost at a bone. It strikes him as ironic; Robb has everything other than the freedom to choose, and Jon has nothing but. Jon’s not used to feeling awful for someone besides himself.

*****

“What is this about you going to the Wall?”

The door slams open so hard that it strikes the wall and vibrates in place until Jon moves past Robb to swing it shut. There are leaves in Robb's hair and stuck to the toes of his boots, like he didn't even pause on the way from the yard to Jon's room. He must have talked to Uncle Benjen. Jon had asked Ben not to tell anyone, but he probably thought Jon didn't consider Robb as "anyone." In any other situation, he would have been right.

“And hello to you too,” Jon says, his tone light despite the immediate tightness he feels in his chest at Robb’s words. He’d been dreading this conversation. The only thing he couldn’t figure out was whether he dreaded Robb being angry or Robb not being angry. Right about now, it seems like either was a good option.

“Spare me,” Robb tells him, clipped and tense. “What is this about the Wall.”

Jon shrugs, fiddles with the edge of his sleeve. “Have to go somewhere.” Robb rears back and looks incredulous.

“You’re already somewhere,” he says. “You’re _here_ , which is where you’re supposed to be.” Jon looks at Robb, at his bemused expression. He can’t conceive of being unwanted. He’s never been unwanted a second in his life. And he’s never not gotten what _he_ wanted. It makes Jon tired, almost angry. He almost hates Robb for making him point it out, that Jon’s life is different.

“You might be the only one who thinks that true,” he says wearily. Robb is so sure of his place. And why wouldn’t he be? He’s the heir to Winterfell, future lord of the north, whose life has been mapped out since the second he was born. How can Jon explain to him that the idea of going to the Wall is almost a relief? He’ll have a place, and direction. He’ll never be expected to fumble with girls, to take a wife. Taking the Black will leave him Robb’s and Robb’s alone, in a strange way. And never having to see Robb married will leave him Jon’s in some way as well.

“Jon, stop this fucking nonsense,” Robb grits out, anger creeping into his voice. “You’re not going to the fucking Wall, all right?”

“What else would you have me do?” Jon explodes, angry right back. “Shall I stay here with you? Hide from your lady mother in your bedchambers? Skulk about like a criminal in the place I thought was my home? There is no room for me in your life, Robb, and you know that as well as I.”

Robb’s face changes, turns to anguish. “As well or better,” he whispers. Jon struggles to hold on to his anger. He won’t let himself be consumed by the pain and misery on Robb’s face, he _can’t_. This is _his_ pain. He’ll not give over to Robb on yet one more battlefield. He tries to hold Robb away, but Robb is strong, and determined. Robb sinks against Jon with a sigh, as if it’s what he’s been waiting to do his whole life. Without his permission, Jon’s arms come up to encircle Robb.

“You’ll be so cold,” Robb says, voice subdued. Jon smiles ruefully.

“I’ll get a warmer cloak.”

“You’ll be so far,” Robb says then, plaintive, sounding almost like a little boy again. Jon’s heart gives a sympathetic lurch.

“Not so far as all that,” he says quietly.

“I’ll spend every day until you leave trying to talk you out of it,” Robb warns.

Jon’s smile turns bittersweet and pained. He buries his nose in Robb’s soft hair and breathes him in, his particular scent of spice and hearth smoke so familiar to Jon now as to be noticeable only in its absence. “I’m counting on it,” Jon whispers.

*****

They’ve barely been apart since Bran fell over a week ago. They’ve slept little more. Worry and fear have made such a commonplace activity too difficult to accomplish often. More than one night, Jon has finally slipped into the shallowest sleep only to jerk awake at Robb’s thrash beside him, his hoarse shout as he comes awake from the grips of a nightmare. Not all the nightmares have been Robb’s either. The image of Bran in his bed, pale and so deathly still, is burned behind Jon’s eyelids. Every time he tries to sleep, he sees Bran’s small form, dreams him dead, dying, falling and falling and falling to the ground with the most sickening thump.

Jon had tried to leave Robb alone that first night, thinking maybe he’d sleep better without Jon there to disturb him. Robb had found him in his own room not moments after Jon left. He’d climbed in beside Jon, circled a shaking hand around the column of Jon’s throat and sworn he would kill him if Jon left him again. Helpless against the anguish on Robb’s face, Jon had only nodded before tugging Robb down to his chest, wrapping him up in limbs and furs until they weren’t even a breath apart in their warm cocoon. Robb had cried, so hard Jon feared he might shake apart. His tears were hot as fire against Jon’s neck, Jon’s own tears slipping down to join them. Robb’s body had been strong in Jon’s arms, his grip tight enough to almost be painful; that such a body could prove as fragile as Bran’s – strong, agile Bran – seemed unthinkable, yet somehow it was all Jon could imagine. For the first time, going to the Wall seems far more complicated than merely living apart from Robb. For the first time, Jon realizes that he and Robb may not always be able to find their way back to each other.

Knowing that Bran will live makes things easier, albeit not easy. No one seems to entertain the notion that he might never wake, but Jon knows it’s there, under the surface, making uneasiness ripple through everyone and everything. Robb prefers to pretend it impossible. Bran will wake and that will be that, he’ll hear of no other future. Jon isn’t so sure, has never been so sure as Robb is in anything, but he holds his tongue, unwilling to express thoughts that will only upset them both. Not when the future Robb sees is the future Jon so desperately wants as well.

Robb is at the window staring down into the yard when Jon comes to his room, a tray with bread and cheese and fruit in his hands. Robb’s eaten almost as little as he’s slept, his face growing gaunt even in such a short span of time. In the scheme of everything, it’s a small unhappiness, but something about it unsettles Jon profoundly. Robb should never be diminished so.

“Brought you food,” Jon says, setting the tray on the small table next to the window. “You should eat.” It takes a moment for Robb to hear him. His eyes are unfocused when he turns to Jon, moving from Jon’s face to the food and back.

“Not hungry,” he says with an apologetic smile, but he takes a hunk of cheese anyway, gamely eats a few bites. Robb may not say so, but Jon knows he’s refused food offered by anyone else. He knows Robb does it for him.

“Bran looked well this morning,” Jon says. “He had more color.”

“His direwolf seemed calmer as well,” Robb nods. His mind seems only half on his words. He raises a hand to Jon’s face to thumb at the corner of Jon’s mouth, where the hair is sparse and the skin smooth, mustache separate from beard. It’s an absent gesture, unthinking, as if he doesn’t realize he’s doing it. After so long, they know every bit of each other intimately. They have favored spots they come back to time and again. Then Robb blinks and his eyes focus on Jon’s. “I’m so tired,” he admits in a voice so small that it wrenches Jon’s heart to hear.

“So sleep,” Jon says, more evenly than he’d though himself capable of, and he takes Robb’s hand to lead him to his bed. Robb follows obediently, like a child, allowing Jon to strip off his breeches and jerkin, leaving him only his shirt as he lies down. Robb catches Jon’s hand when Jon would have moved away, meaning to leave Robb to sleep. Robb, it appears, has other ideas.

“You too,” Robb murmurs, his eyes already heavy and flagging. Jon shouldn’t. Only days remain before he’s to leave for the Wall and he has more to do than he’ll have time to finish. None of it seems important right now, though, so he shucks his own shirt and breeches to climb in beside Robb clad only in his smallclothes. Robb stirs against him and smiles. “I have the Maiden in my bed,” he says.

Soon Robb’s breathing evens, puffing warm and sweet against Jon’s neck. Jon doesn’t want to sleep, knowing his moments with Robb are numbered and growing fewer by the day. His body feels heavy, though, like he’s sinking into the sea, falling over and over, and he finds he can’t keep his eyes open.

The afternoon sun is slanting through the window when he blinks awake, motes sparkling in the air like gold. Robb is sleep-warm against him, so vulnerable and trusting that Jon could cry. Jon knows that if tears started now, they might never stop, so he presses gentle lips against Robb’s temple to stave them off, against his brow, the curve of his eye, his cheek, his jaw. Robb makes a sleepy murmur and turns his face up to Jon’s, as if even in his dreams he wants his kiss. Gods, Jon thinks. How can I feel this much? How can any one person feel so very much?

It’s more than pleasure that spreads through him when he takes Robb’s lips; it’s longing and it’s sorrow, pain and joy and love, love that crowds out all else, love that swells inside him like to burst through his skin. Jon shakes with it, not trusting himself with such things flooding him. He turns his head and buries his face in Robb’s hair, the curls soft and ticklish against his nose.

“You’re not supposed to stop,” Robb says, sounding half-asleep still.

“Robb,” Jon whispers, anguished. “I feel too much, I need…” He falters, his throat thick and useless. His eyes are squeezed shut against Robb’s hair still, the world behind them black and sightless. It’s all that allows him to say such things, to give voice to the weakness inside him. “I don’t trust myself to be gentle.”

“So don’t be gentle,” Robb suggests. The softness in it gives Jon the courage to pull away and look at Robb’s face, more dear to him than he ever believed possible. Robb’s face might be a mirror of his own, overfull of feeling and impossible wants. Jon shudders from it. He’s been alone in so much throughout his life, but it all fades in knowing he’s not alone in this, this one thing that means more than every other combined and doubled.

Don’t be gentle, Robb had said, and indeed Jon would have thought himself incapable, but an ease overcomes him and his lips on Robb’s skin are whisper-light, the brush of the wind over a leaf. Robb’s shirt is a barrier and Jon pulls it away, draws it over Robb’s head and throws it aside impatiently. Every inch of Robb’s skin, every bit of his body, every plane and curve and shadow knows the touch of Jon’s mouth. Robb holds perfectly still, as if Jon is a wild animal he might frighten away. Only his hands move, fingers twined in Jon’s hair, following Jon as he moves down Robb’s body to pour out every feeling that threatens to overflow him with his lips, his tongue, his hands. Nothing else could express what he feels, no words exist to encompass something of such breadth and depth, bigger than Winterfell, wider than Westeros, greater than the whole of the world.

Robb’s hands lose their grip when Jon shifts lower, sliding his lips along the furred skin of Robb’s thighs, over knees and calves, to ankles almost delicate where bones press close to skin. Jon lifts Robb’s foot, presses his face to the instep, fingers looped around Robb’s ankle like a manacle that might hold him there forever.

“Jon,” Robb calls him, “Jon, please.” His hands are fists in the furs, his face a beautiful mask of longing. Heeding the unspoken request, Jon moves back up Robb’s body, covering every bit he’d lavished before in reverse, until he’s where Robb wants him, where Robb can kiss him with shaking lips and helpless desperation.

“I don’t want you to leave,” Robb says, pained, voice thick, fingers clenching in Jon’s hair.

“So tell me not to leave,” Jon tells him, but Robb can’t, Jon knows he can’t. He never would have said it otherwise. He’d sooner be able to fly to the Wall on his own wings than go if Robb told him to stay. A traitorous part of him would stay anyway, would take any amount of pain to remain with Robb. But Jon knows nothing has changed. He knows there’s no room for him here, no matter how he and Robb both wish it otherwise. If he stayed, Robb would find some way to make room, to force Jon in where he doesn’t belong, and he’d refuse to give until they were all miserable, every single one of them. No, nothing has changed, and the injustice of it threatens to destroy him, so Jon laughs to bridge the silence, forces a lightness into his voice that he doesn’t feel.

“You could come with me,” Jon suggests. His head means it as a joke, but it sounds too serious by half out loud, his heart leaping painfully at the idea and constructing a hundred fantasy lives they could have, adventures they could live, happiness they could hold onto and never hide.

“How?” Robb asks, a world of helpless anguish packed into one tiny word. Just as Robb couldn’t tell Jon how to stay, so Jon can’t tell Robb how to go. All he can do is kiss Robb as if he could transfer a piece of himself into him and they could always be together, no matter how far they’re apart.

Jon’s not sure when the kiss changes. Time has become meaningless, marked only in heartbeats, in touches and groans. He only knows that Robb’s gentleness has turned to urgency, his warmth has turned to fire. He levers up under Jon, pushes him back to the bed to straddle his thighs, already hard and hot against him. Blindly, Jon reaches for him, wanting to circle his fingers around Robb’s cock and make him spill on Jon’s belly, but Robb catches first one hand, then the other, and pins them over Jon’s head. He’s leaned over Jon, close enough for Jon to feel the heat of his breath against Jon’s lips. The intensity of his gaze is almost painful, but Jon can’t look away, is as helpless as a rabbit in a snare. Slowly, deliberately, staring into Jon’s eyes the whole time, Robb grinds his cock against Jon’s through his smallclothes, hips moving in a way lewd enough to make Jon flush and color, even after all they’ve done together. The sound that escapes Jon’s lips is long and shivery, barely human.

Just when Jon thinks he can bear no more, that he might actually perish from the fire in his belly, Robb releases his wrists to flow down his body like water. His mouth is hot and wet through Jon’s smallclothes, the linen barely blunting the feel of Robb’s tongue until it’s soaked through and might as well not exist for all the barrier it provides. Robb tugs the cloth down with insistent fingers, pulls it down Jon’s legs roughly enough to scrape red marks down his thighs. Robb soothes each mark, lovingly marking the passage of his nails with his tongue, before licking a line around Jon’s cock.

Jon knows he’ll be sore tomorrow, so tight and tense are his muscles. He’s actually partway up off the bed, curled towards Robb like a curving line of script. Robb is watching him from where he works at Jon’s cock, eyes peeking up from beneath dark lashes, the very picture of lost innocence. It’s a sight that will be burned on Jon’s mind forever, he knows, something he’ll remember every time he feels lost or lonely or unwanted. Then Robb’s eyes turn dark, he slips a finger lower and Jon is practically up off the bed from the questioning pressure, the dip just barely inside him. There’s suggestion in Robb’s face, a question. Jon has done this to Robb many times, but never the other way around. Like a bellows, Jon’s lungs contract, the air in him rushing out in a gust of longing.

“Only fair,” Jon reminds Robb, voice tight with need. Robb smiles, eyes gone black and wild, wild like the feeling in Jon’s chest, fluttering against his ribs like a caged bird.

“A true Stark,” Robb says, and the words sing through Jon, make his bones melt into water.

Jon remembers the first time they did this, how he gave Robb his fingers to suck. Robb sucks his own fingers this time, eyes never leaving Jon’s as he slips two between lips and teeth, the pink flag of his tongue showing bright against them before his lips close and purse in an almost obscene drag from knuckle to fingertip. Already Jon’s breathing is shallow, his pulse a hammer in his neck, in the crooks of his elbows, in his cock. Then Robb's hand is dropping to tease at Jon, to press and seek entrance, and it’s like nothing Jon’s ever felt. When Robb eases forward, the push of his cock is blunt, bolder than his fingers, a stinging stretch. Jon gasps, feeling the fullness up to his throat practically, and Robb echoes it.

“Gods, Jon,” he pants, face twisted in need, and Jon remembers that feeling, remembers the sick-sweet ache, so close but so different from the ache he feels now. “You’re so… _gods_.” He’s holding still, arms trembling as he holds himself over Jon, elbows shaking like he might fall. Need and love twist in Jon’s belly; instinctively he hitches his knees up closer to his chest, wanting Robb nearer, deeper, fully inside him. Moaning, helpless, Robb sinks deeper, and Jon cries out with the feel of it. He hadn’t understood before. He hadn’t known the level to which Robb gave himself over, how completely he’d trusted Jon, how vulnerable and open he must have felt, as much as Jon does now.

“Jon,” Robb rasps. “Are you all right? Did I…” The coin has fully flipped, then, and Jon would laugh if he were capable of such a thing right now. He manages to raise a smug eyebrow at Robb, and Robb does laugh, the vibration of it striking Jon like a hammer to a bell and making his whole body ring. Robb starts to move, slow and deep. He’s saying Jon’s name over and over, almost chanting it, and if Jon had breath left for words he’d be saying Robb’s as well, but it’s just a litany in his head, _Robb, Robb, Robb_ , until he can think no longer.

Robb draws it out, waits long enough to touch Jon’s cock that a single stroke is all it takes to make him shiver and fly apart. Jon thinks he might break, might literally shake into pieces that could never be put back together. He’s still quivering, his breath evening and smoothing, when Robb stiffens and jerks against him, almost sharply enough to give Jon pain if his body weren’t completely boneless and depleted. He feels Robb spill within him, his body rocking with the pulses of his release until he drops onto Jon’s chest to pant and shake and hold Jon to the world.

Everything is a mess, both of them slick and sweaty, the sheet on the bed a disaster beneath them. They should clean up, take care of themselves, but Robb doesn’t seem inclined to move and Jon thinks he would rather die than be even a hairsbreadth away from him. He holds Robb to him with arms and legs, holds his body the way he can’t hold his life. Jon doesn’t want to cry. He hates to cry, hates how it feels, but nothing he does stops the hot slide of tears down his temples to collect in the wells of his ears. He holds Robb as tightly as he can, and then just a bit tighter.

Robb pretends not to notice the tears when he finally moves, pretends not to see them even as he licks the salt from Jon’s ears and cheeks and eyelashes. Something in his kiss is new and different, now. It reminds Jon of how Winterfell looks from a distance, the same place he’s known his whole life but somehow not the same.

“I didn’t realize,” Robb whispers, tongue against the shell of Jon’s ear, collecting his tears.

“Neither did I,” Jon answers him, and turns his face into Robb’s kiss. It’s like it was that first time, as if kissing is the only thing in the world, as if they’ve all the time they could possibly want to taste and touch each other. They kiss for ages, rolling over each other on the bed, discovering everything as if it’s new, as if they’re different people, strangers who’ve known each other forever. And maybe somehow they are.

“Think of me when you’re gone,” Robb says, and the words are full of everything, pleasure and longing and sorrow, pain and joy and love, love, love.

“Every second,” Jon says against Robb’s mouth. “Every single second.”

 

*****  
*****

 

He’s wanted to desert a thousand times. He’s wanted to run, to send a raven, to sprout wings and take flight himself to get to Robb. Every day he’s woken, knowing part of him is somewhere else. That part of him is dead and gone now. Robb is dead and gone. Gone and left Jon to regret. One more regret in a life overfull of them.

The raven had come that morning - dark wings, dark words, Lady Stark would have said. She’s gone too, something that gives Jon a pang of sorrow even in the face of Robb’s unspeakable loss. When he’d been a boy, he’d longed for her to love him as a mother, as if he were her own. It had been Robb he cried to, not wanting to show their father his weakness. It had been Robb who said they were brothers no matter what, that their mothers didn’t matter. That Jon would always have him. Could Jon have stopped this if he stayed? Could he have protected Robb, saved him? A dangerous road to start down; if Jon’s learned anything since he left, it’s that life’s turns are unpredictable. But still. He wonders if Robb had been scared when he died, and suddenly it’s as if the Wall pitches under his feet, his stomach swooping sickeningly.

“Jon,” Sam cries, catching his elbow. “ _Jon!_ Are you all right?”

“I should have been with him,” is the only thing Jon can say, the only thing in his heart; it burns a hole in him. It’s a poison.

“To protect him,” Sam says, confirming rather than asking.

 _Or to die with him_ , Jon thinks, but he only nods. Compassion is on Sam’s face, compassion Jon almost can’t bear because it makes the loss all too real. “I’m fine, Sam. I’ll be fine.” Even as he says the words, Jon wonders if they’ll ever be true. It seems impossible. He remembers Robb that last day in Winterfell, how the early snow collected on his eyelashes and melted into water. How Jon wanted to hold him, to kiss that water away, to climb inside him and wear him like a cloak. Saying goodbye believing he would see Robb again had been hard enough; how could Jon ever have done it if he’d known how Robb’s road ended?

Jon shakes his head, forces himself to keep walking along the top of the wall. Time is a luxury he doesn’t have at the moment, no matter how he wants to turn into himself, to remember Robb’s laughter, his touch. They way they’d moved together, the way they’d come to function almost as one being. The way being with Robb felt like the only thing Jon was ever meant to do with his life. He can still hear Robb’s voice, still taste the flavor of him like it’s been seconds instead of years.

“Jon?” Sam’s voice jars him out of his head, back into the present.

“Yes, sorry Sam.”

“Maybe you should take a moment, Jon? You look terrible.”

“I’m all right, Sam. I was just...” Jon stops, swallows against the cold air, flakes of snow wet where they dot his lower lip. “Leagues away.” He looks out over the wall, over the whole of the north towards Winterfell and the Twins. They hadn’t seemed quite so far away before today. Now they might as well be on the moon. “I was just a lifetime away.”

 

  
_title from Song of the Dying Gunner by Charles Causley_  



End file.
